OPINION:
Speaking ill of the dead is not nice, as most of us learn at mother’s knee, but there are exceptions. Fidel Castro deserves no nice thoughts simply because he’s dead. He was a despot and a tyrant, an unrepentant rogue with the conscience of a hangman, and we can be glad that he’s dead.
President Obama went as far as he could decently go with condolences to the “Cuban people,” but there can be no forgetting his legacy of firing squads, plundering of the public treasury, obliviousness to the hunger of the people and the denial of the fundamental human rights of free speech, freedom of worship, association, assembly and due process of law.
Mr. Obama regards his diplomatic opening to Havana as a key part of the legacy of his own, but so far he has failed to demand reciprocal changes in response to changes and concessions made by the United States. The president should restrain any impulses he may have now to fly to Havana to join other heads of state to say insincere things at the blow-out funeral no doubt sure to follow. Attending foreign funerals is what a vice president is for, but he should keep Joe Biden at home for this one.
Castro was 90 when he died, and his brother Raul, the new maximum leader, is 85, and change will soon be upon Cuba. Nothing improves dictatorships like a few strategic funerals, and the United States must use whatever influence Mr. Obama wants to exert to clear the way for the flowering of democracy on the island.
The left, bereft of its Caribbean icon, is eager to celebrate Castro the Marxist ideologue. Justin Trudeau, the Canadian premier, professes “deep sorrow” at the passing of “a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century” and “made significant improvements to the education and health care of his island nation.” But the appetite of men and women who yearn to breathe free is for more than a plate of beans.
Castro’s legacy was writ large during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when the world stood at the edge of nuclear war and held its breath as President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev confronted each other over the nuclear missiles the Soviets had positioned 90 miles off the coast of Florida.
Castro lobbied the Soviet premier to use those nuclear missiles and chided him when he withdrew the missiles and the world relaxed. Khrushchev replied as if a professor tutoring a particularly thick student: “In your cable of October 27th you proposed that we be the first to carry out a nuclear strike against the enemy’s territory. Naturally you understand where that would lead us. It would not be a simple strike, but the start of a thermonuclear war.
“Dear Comrade Fidel Castro, I find your proposal to be wrong … Cuba would have burned in the fires of war … We struggle against imperialism not in order to die, but to draw on our potential, to lose as little as possible, and later to win more …”
It was a remarkable rebuke to a man who had revealed a remarkable ignorance of reality, a man who was willing to sacrifice every single one of his own people to build a Marxist utopia. The Cubans in exile in Miami, who poured into the streets to celebrate the death of the tyrant, got the response to the good news just right.
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